With the help of reports from Reddit's r/SAT, I’ve compiled a list of the most common and challenging vocabulary from the May 2026 US SAT. I've put these into a quiz format for students and parents to challenge themselves. Good luck!

SAT Vocabulary May 2, 2026 Official SAT - Warm-up Reading Passage

Instructions: Read this passage carefully before taking your quiz. All 17 vocabulary words from the May 2, 2026 Official SAT appear in context. Pay attention to how each word is used naturally in the story.

The Retraction

Warm-up Reading Passage

Dr. Sylvie Marchand had served on the editorial board of the Journal of Behavioral Economics for eleven years, and in that time she had witnessed precisely two formal retractions. Both had been straightforward: clear data fabrication, unambiguous misconduct, unanimous votes. The case before the board now was none of those things.

The paper under review — a landmark study on compliance and incentive structures published five years earlier — had shaped the field's direction for half a decade. Its lead author, Professor Daniel Wren, was among the most cited researchers in behavioral science. The challenge to his work had emerged from two independent replication teams whose results diverged significantly from his original findings. Whether those findings had now been genuinely repudiated by the weight of subsequent evidence, or whether the replication teams had simply misapplied Wren's methodology, was the central question before the board.

Wren's supporters argued that the entire controversy was contrived — manufactured by rivals whose professional interests were directly threatened by his conclusions. They pointed to the antecedence of similar coordinated attacks on paradigm-shifting research, noting that history offered no shortage of cases in which genuine innovation had been suppressed by entrenched factions unwilling to capitulate to new evidence. The board, they insisted, should not allow procedural pressure to substitute for careful analysis.

Those calling for retraction were equally firm. The board's chair, Professor Amara Diallo, had received a detailed memorandum from its methodologist arguing that conflict-of-interest rules effectively served to preclude three of Wren's closest collaborators from participating in the vote — a constraint that further shrank the margin available for consensus. The board was required to adhere to its published retraction standards, which mandated action whenever published findings could no longer be supported by the preponderance of available evidence. Sentiment about an author's legacy, however genuine, was not a legitimate factor.

The most intransigent voice in the room was Professor Henrik Lund, a longtime colleague of Wren's who refused to acknowledge even the possibility of methodological error. His position had not shifted across four meetings, and Diallo had come to suspect it never would. At the opposite end of the table, four board members were equally immovable in their support for retraction. Between these factions, two remaining members continued to vacillate, drafting position statements they subsequently withdrew, asking for additional expert opinions that arrived and were immediately disputed.

As the fifth meeting opened, Diallo made a deliberate choice to reframe the question. Rather than allowing factions to continue to vie for rhetorical dominance, she redirected the discussion toward a single procedural question: did the available evidence meet the journal's published threshold for retraction, yes or no? Stripped of its professional and personal dimensions, the question became considerably easier to answer. By the end of the session, Lund remained in dissent — his objection formally entered into the record at his request — but the vote was five to two in favor of a retraction notice that documented the specific findings subsequent research had failed to replicate.

Diallo signed the notice the following morning. It was, she reflected, among the more consequential acts of her career — not because it ended anything, but because it kept something intact that was worth considerably more than any single paper: the journal's credibility as an institution willing to correct itself.

Vocabulary words practiced: repudiated, contrived, antecedence, capitulate, preclude, adhere, intransigent, vacillate, vie